Compositional Semantics: Putting Meanings Together

I. Concept

Definition: the study of linguistic meaning

• Semantics is part of the grammar.

The meaning of a complex expression is determined by: • the meanings of its parts, and • the way in which
those parts are combined

A cat chased a small rat.

A small rat chased a cat.

Principle of Compositionality
 Investigating propositions and their relationships is one aspect of Compositionality Semantics.
 The meanings of phrasal expression (sentences) depends on the meanings of the word they
contain.
 The meaning of sentences( or any other multi-word expression) is a function of the meanings of the
words it contains , and how these words are syntactically combined.
 It is not just the meaning of words that are relevant for figuring out the meanings of larger expressions
that contain them.
Example: a. Sally loves Polly
b. Polly loves Sally
 The sentences contains the same words, none of which are ambiguous . However, sentence in
(a) expresses different propositions than the sentence in (b).
 It is possible for the proposition expressed by (a) to be true and the expressed by (b) to be false-
unrequited love is real possibility.
  It simply states that the meanings of multi-word expressions are compositional, that is predictable
from the meanings of words and their syntactic combination.
Combining the Meanings of Verb Phrases and Noun Phrases
 The process for computing the meaning of the whole sentence from the meanings of it’s two
constituents, an NP and VP.
S

NP VP
(Sandy) (Runs)
 Sandy refer to specific entities in the world and intransitive verbs like runs refer to sets of entities in
the world.
Sandy Some individual Sandy
Runs Set of all runners in the world
 How can we figure out, based on the reference of Sandy and runs. What truth conditions for the
proposition Sandy runs are?
 For the proposition expressed by Sandy runs to be true.
Combining the Meanings of Adjectives and Nouns
 Complex sort of composition when we turn our attention to adjective-noun combination
 Adjective and noun syntactically covered the same way in green sweater, good food, and fake
money. We will see that in each of these phrases, their meanings combine differently.
Pure Intersection
 In the phrase green sweater, we have two words green and sweater, each of which refers to a set of
entities (individual/objects)
 To compute the meaning of the phrase then we need only collect all the entities that are both of
green things and of sweaters.
 Healthy cow, blue suit, working women etc. They produce pure intersections, adjectives like healthy,
blue and working called intersective adjectives.
Relative Intersection
 Other adjective do not necessarily combine with nouns.
Subjective Adjective
 In order to use and understand phrases of the form good and common noun correctly, we must have
more knowledge about the context than in other cases of relative intersection.
II. Problems and Issues under Compositional Semantics: Putting meanings together

1. Some Compositionality fails.

 Consider the expression “Kicked the bucket” in “Ck kicked the bucket”. This sentence could mean
that Ck performed some physical action whereby her foot came into forceful contact with some
bucket.
 This is the compositional meaning of this sentence that we can compute based on the meanings of
Ck , kicked, and bucket along with the syntactic structure of the sentences.
2. It is not possible to identify a set of big things in absolute terms.
 Ex. “Big whale” What is big for whale is tiny for mountains, What is big for mice is tiny for whales,
what is short for giraffe is tall for a chicken.
 It is possible to find a set of whales independently, the set represented by the adjective Big-for-
a-whale; Similarly tall giraffe will involve a set of things that are tall for giraffe and loud-explosion,
 The reference of the adjective has to be determined relative to the reference of the noun.
3. In a certain combination of words, (verb phrase+noun phrase or Adjective+noun) there are
different meanings that we might understand for these combination of words.
 It varies different understandings from different kind of people, and it can be the time where
some people has different interpretations: Different kinds of approach.
III. Researches under Compositional Semantics

On compositional semantics
WIodek Zadrozny

Abstract
We prove a theorem stating that any semantics can be encoded as a compositional semantics,
which means that, essentially, the standard definition of compositionality is for- mally vacuous.
We then show that when one re- quires compositional semantics to be "systematic" (that is the
meaning function can- not be arbitrary, but must belong to some class), one can easily
distinguish between compositional and non-compositional semantics. We also pre- sent an
example of a simple grammar for which there is no "systematic" compositional seman- tics. This
implies that it is possible to distinguish "good" and "bad" grammars oll the basis of whether they
can have compositional semantics. As a result, we believe that the paper clarifies the concept
of compositionality and opens a possi- bility of making systematic comparisons of dif- ferent
systems of grammars and NLU programs.

Compositional Semantics in Verbmobil

Johan Bos; Bjoirn Gambrick; Christian Lieske; Yoshiki Mori Manfred; Pinkal Karsten
Worm

Abstract
The paper discusses how compositional semantics is implemented in the Verb- mobil speech-
to-speech translation sys- tem using LUD, a description language for underspecified discourse
representa- tion structures. The description lan- guage and its formal interpretation in DRT are
described as well as its imple- mentation together with the architecture of the system's entire
syntactic-semantic processing module. We show that a lin- guistically sound theory and
formalism can be properly implemented in a sys- tem with (near) real-time requirements.

A Compositional Semantics for Focusing Subjuncts

Abstract
A compositional semantics for focusing subjuncts-- words such as only, even, and also--is
developed from Rooth's theory of association with focus. By adapting the theory so that it can
be expressed in terms of a frame-based semantic formalism, a seman- tics that is more
computationally practical is arrived at. This semantics captures pragmatic subtleties by
incorporating a two-part representation, and recog- nizes the contribution of intonation to
meaning.
CompositionalSemanticsusingFeature-BasedModelsfromWordNet

Abstract
This article describes a method to build semantic representations of composite expressions in a
compositional way by using WordNet relations to represent the meaning of words. The meaning
of a target word is modelled as a vector in which itssemanticallyrelatedwordsareassigned
weights according to both the type of the relationship and the distance to the target word. Word
vectors are compositionally combined by syntactic dependencies. Each syntactic dependency
triggers two complementary compositional functions: thenamedheadfunctionanddependent
function. The experiments show that the proposed compositional method performs as the state-
of-the-art for subjectverb expressions, and clearly outperforms
thebestsystemfortransitivesubject-verbobject constructions. 1 Introduction The principle of
composition

PARTS OF WORDS: COMPOSITIONAL

SEMANTICS FOR PROSODIC CONSTITUENTS
by
RON ARTSTEIN

Abstract
Focus below the word level (e.g. Jill only brought home a stalagMITE from the cave) and
coordination of parts of words (ortho and periodontists) show that the compositional processes
of focus and coordination apply to units that lack an independent meaning. Such constructions
are interpreted through phonological decomposition, which assigns denotations to otherwise
meaningless phonological units. The denotation of a focused or coordinate part is a string of
sound (so the word part mite denotes its own sound), and the rest of the word denotes a function
from sounds to word meanings: stalag denotes a function that for each sound α yields the
meaning of the word stalagα, and dontist maps a sound α to the meaning of the word αdontist.
The grammar of focus and coordination works the same way above and below the word level.
Given phonological decomposition, the alternative set (Rooth 1985, 1992b) for stalagMITE
includes the meanings of the words stalagmite and stalactite— meanings formed by applying
the denotation of stalag to a string of sound; this alternative set is used in computing the
restriction on only. The sentence Bill and Martha are ortho and periodontists is true in case Bill
is an orthodontist and Martha is a periodontist by virtue of a cumulative inference (Scha 1981),
since Bill stands in the dontist relation to the string ortho, and Martha to the string perio.
Cumulative conjunction is motivated independently, accounting for multiple plurality readings of
coordinate plural adjectives (Italian quadrati e rotondi ‘square-pl and round-pl’ applies to a
minimum of four objects). Only prosodic units the size of a foot or larger can be focused or
coordinated: a morphological or PHONOlogical solution and morpho and phonological are fine,
but *morphology or PHONOlogy and *morpho and phonology are ungrammatical because the
morphemes phono, morpho are not prosodic constituents in phonology, morphology. Echo
questions are interpreted via focus semantics, which licenses them on word parts (Mononga-
WHAT?), and exempts them from locality restrictions in general. Echo questions are only
“metalinguistic” when they occur on word parts; this is because below the word level,
compositional semantics is sensitive to the form of linguistic.

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